cairn-direction

cairn-direction is a command for coding agents from isaacriehm/cairn. It costs 19 tokens per session (245 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A manual command that sends a task description through Cairn's process for clarifying and organizing development work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to tighten an incomplete request, gather project context, ask key questions, write a clearer specification, and divide work into chunks.
Why use it?
It helps surface important ambiguities when automatic task detection does not start that process.

Command

Part of the cairn plugin — 5 skills, 4 commands, 5 agents, 5 hooks, 1 MCP server shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add commands/isaacriehm/cairn/cairn-direction
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/isaacriehm/cairn

Or install cairn, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 5 skills, 4 commands, 5 agents, 5 hooks, 1 MCP server.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for cairn-direction

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/isaacriehm/cairn/cairn-direction.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/commands/isaacriehm/cairn/cairn-direction)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/commands/isaacriehm/cairn/cairn-direction"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/isaacriehm/cairn/cairn-direction.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 19 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 245 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00019 $0.00245
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.00122
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00049
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00024

Measured 5d ago against content hash 0e4fe5f5207f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cairn-direction scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 5d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

packages/cairn-plugin/commands/cairn-direction.md · 30 lines

What it actually says

/cairn:cairn-direction

Manually trigger the cairn-direction skill on the argument prompt. Equivalent to the auto-invoked path but bypasses the trigger gate.

Behavior

Treat the slash-command argument as the operator's task prompt. Invoke the cairn-direction skill with that prompt. The skill runs its normal pipeline — gather in-scope context, ask load-bearing questions, write tightened spec, dispatch chunks.

If the argument is empty:

/cairn:cairn-direction needs a task description. Example: /cairn:cairn-direction add a webhook for stripe disputes

When to use

  • The operator's prior message was conversational ("can we talk about X") but the operator now wants Cairn to take it as a task.
  • Auto-invoke skipped a borderline message (read-only at a glance, but actually a refactor request).
  • Forcing tightening on a partially-specified prompt to surface its ambiguities before writing code.
Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 5d ago First seen · 30 lines · 19 tokens per session scan A 0e4fe5f5207f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cairn-direction is a command published in the GitHub repository isaacriehm/cairn (6 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 19 tokens to every session and 245 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.